Occupying center stage, on a coffee table in the living room of a
traditional and fashionable Lake Shore Drive apartment, sits a Banker's
Box of Chicago-based columnist Ann Landers' letters from readers. "This
one's going into the book," she tells her audience as she reads us some of
the choicer missives. For many of the letters, she maintains a certain
detached sense of amusementwhat else could possibly be an appropriate
reaction to a writer who asks Ann what to do about a husband who greets
guests swinging from a tree and dressed as a chimpanzee? Others are more
mundanediscussing the proper way to mount a roll of toilet paper, for
example. The letters are funny enough, but Miss Landers' acid-tongued and
straight-to-the point commentary, as delivered by two-time Tony winner
Judith Ivey, keeps the audience smiling pretty much throughout the piece.

David Rambo's one-woman play places the audience as invited guests of
sorts in the home of Esther Pauline "Eppie" Friedman Lederer, who wrote an
advice column under the name Ann Landers from 1955 until her death in
2002. On this particular 1975 evening, Eppie is facing a bit of writer's
block as she struggles to find the words to tell her readers that she and
her husband Julius have agreed to divorce following his affair with a much
younger woman. She's happy to procrastinate while reading to us some of
her readers' more colorful letters as well as proudly recounting her drive
to urge readers to write President Nixon and urge funding for cancer
research. Between her asides to the audience are phone
calls from daughter Margo and sister "Popo" (Pauline Esther Friedman
Phillips, who wrote the competing column "Dear Abby" until 1995). The
laughs are broken up with comments from some of the touching and
desperate-sounding letters from readers in need, like the gay teenager who
claims to be considering suicide or stories of her trips to Vietnam during
the war and her follow-up phone calls to the families of soldiers she met
over there.

The corollary to being the "lady with all the answers" is that she's
also the lady who has to take all the questions. In an era before
widespread acceptance of support groups or public declarations of personal
problems on TV talk shows, we see how the job of confidant to millions is
a burden, indeed. When Eppie finally finishes and reads to us the column
she's had difficulty finishing, we hear her admission that "the lady with
all the answers doesn't have the answer to this one"the question of why,
after advising thousands of readers on their marriages, she was unable to
save her own. At the end of the day, the lady who seemed somehow above her
needy readers is clearly as human as the rest of them and even more bound
to them as their confessor.

Rambo's view of Eppie Lederer is probably an idealized one. There's
little about her feud with her sister or her published views of
homosexuality as a mental disorder, for example. But if not a
full-fledged biography of its subject, as complete as say Golda's
Balcony, for example, it captures the spirit and wit of Ann Landers
in addition to suggesting a bit of symbolic importance to her life and
work.

As directed by B.J. Jones, Miss Ivey captures both dimensions of the
character perfectly. Ivey's voiceeven without working to imitate
Lederer'sis a close-enough match, and she communicates a friendly but
no-nonsense and tough-as-nails tone when recounting some of the more
amusing letters. In the quieter moments, a more sensitive and vulnerable
side comes through. She's held back by Rambo's decision to give more
weight to the lighter moments, and struggles to find a way to mix things up
until the heavier moments near the end of the two-act, 90-minute play.
Still, she keeps us amused through the lighter moments and touches us with
the heavier ones. This is an entertaining and moving play, if a slight
one, but one that is well worthwhile, thanks to the performance of Judith
Ivey.

The Lady with All the Answers will be performed Tuesdays through
Sundays through June 29, 2008 at the North Shore Center for the Performing
Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, IL. Tickets are available by phone at
847-673-6300, online at www.northlight.org or at the box office.